If you want your business to grow and be successful, you can routinely perform a business diagnostic.

This could involve performing strategic benchmarking.

Business benchmarking is a process to compare and measure your business’ performance against other businesses.

Three types of benchmarking which you might want to do include:

1. Competitive Benchmarking: This focuses on comparing your performance against your closest competitors – those who attempt to sell to the same customers in the same region.
2. Functional Benchmarking: You can benchmark against top performing businesses of other industries with regards to specific functions within your business. For example, you can benchmark your sales conversions against not only your direct competitors but also others in similar and varied industries.
3. Best-in-Class Benchmarking: You can cast the net wide and compare against the wider market. Ideally you’d want to do as good as another type of business which isn’t a direct competitor but has a similar risk profile.

In addition, benchmarking shouldn’t be isolated to comparing one’s revenue and expenses, it can be far more encompassing, including looking into your business trends and forecasts as compared to the industry and economy.

By comparing your business to other businesses, you can learn from their success and then identify the areas that you need to improve on.

It’s like having a lemonade stand and looking at other lemonade stands, and figuring out:

• Are your sales superior?
• Do you manage costs more effectively?
• How can you attract more customers?

Benchmarking might reveal some hard truths. You could have an increase in revenue by say 5%, but if you learn that the industry standard is an increase of say 10%, then that means you aren’t keeping pace.

Importantly, the act of benchmarking shouldn’t be looked upon as a once in a long while activity. It should be utilised as a continuous improvement lever.

If you would like a strategic advisor that can help you continuously improve your business with strategic benchmarking, then we are pleased to let you know that we can help.

We have access to nationwide statistics for most industries. We help our clients interpret industry data to see how they compare to their competitors, and we then work with our clients to identify key performance indicators to use in monitoring on-going performance.

We understand that you want to continue to stay ahead of the pack, and we are pleased to equip you with the information you need. Please feel free to reach out to us and gain insights that many businesses don’t have.